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Text of the page (random words):
ies germany the balkans and throughout the world the chinese ottoman and mughal empires from the 15th century into the 18th the international contributors analyse how siege narratives were created and disseminated and how early modern actors as well as later historians made sense of these violent events in both textual and visual artefacts the volume s chronological and geographical breadth provides insight into similarities and differences of siege warfare and military culture across several cultures countries and centuries as well as its impact on both combatants and observers and as bonus if you act now you can see what a semi automated book index with python looks like what a bargain may 27 2019 in methodology research leave a comment cleaning text with python so all us early modern europeanists owe the early english books online project a debt of gratitude tens of thousands of books published in england before the 19c all of them scanned and in the past few years downloadable thanks to the text creation partnership some 60 000 of these 125 000 books have been transcribed into full text versions mostly those published before 1700 next year 2020 everyone with an internet connection will have access to all 60 000 for now those without an institutional subscription will have to do with only 25 000 or so life is hard no surprise scholars have been using this resource for years but only recently have the digital humanities matured to where we can deal with this mass of text on a larger scale using it for more than just individual keyword searches if you want to download what s publicly available you should visit the visualizing english print project but as vep explains the hand transcribed texts have their issues so they ve created simpletext versions of the tcp documents no more outdated xml markup for us and they ve also created processed versions that have cleaned some of the most common errors in the corpus vep is a great service but i want more so i decided to learn python and create my own python code in a jupyter notebook to clean these eebo tcp texts on my own terms some of my corrections replicate what vep has done but my code also goes beyond to make further changes i ll spare you the details here but i go into an obscene amount of detail in the jupyter notebook explaining the various errors i ve encountered and how i went about fixing them the code isn t perfect but it does a pretty good job so far if only through repetitive brute force and it s really helped me learn some basic python along the way though it won t make too much sense until you go through the notebook here s a summary of the variety of errors the notebook checked for in the tcp s 1640 edition of the duke of rohan s compleat captain commentaries on caesar and how many of each it found and corrected if you need a sample of the specific changes made and this is only the beginning so if you re python curious and wonder what all the fuss is about you can check out my github repository https github com ostwaldj eebo_tcp_clean_text but be warned for it to work you ll need to know a tiny bit of python and have python 3 as well as jupyter notebooks preferably via anaconda already installed once you have python jupyter installed you should be able to just download the repo unzip it open the jupyter notebook change the path to your machine and it should be ready to go at least on my sample rohan text for those with just a little bit of python knowledge it should be easy to alter the code e g to expand it to cover additional types of errors or change with just a little bit of hacking hopefully in the future i ll have time to set it up with mybinder so it can be run by anyone in a web browser to the future may 27 2019 in methodology research leave a comment sabbatical in the rear view mirror now that my sabbatical has officially ended the summer begins i ll gradually share with the world all the wonderful digital discoveries from my year of the digital discoveries that have so engulfed my world that i ve slighted the blog for several months but a short teaser list will suffice for now what did i do over the past year of me time why i learned enough python to become a danger to myself and the historical community more generally learned enough qgis geographical information systems to visualize the fruition of my 25 year dream to map early modern military operations reacquainted myself with some of the gritty details of ms access and relational databases because somebody s gotta make a giant dataset of all those early modern wars don t worry there are still plenty of digital skills tools to work on including learning graph databases and learning enough web tools to host custom databases and maps and let s not forget collecting the data to put in those digital tools digital history is the wave of the future after all today but first on the list is to share my first major python project with the world code that will clean eebo tcp text documents making them easier to analyze with natural language processing nlp techniques coming soon january 11 2019 in methodology research leave a comment you might be millner if words like army camp march day pitch and leagues outnumber many common stopwords you might be a campaign journal and if the fifth most common word token is d and if duke and prince are close behind and if you capitalize your common nouns you are pretty well assur d that you are in fact an 18th century campaign journal millner s compendious journal 1733 to be precise for those moderns sticklers for method lowercasing the text doesn t invalidate the point now cleaning the dirty ocred text that s another matter december 6 2018 in research resources 3 comments what exactly python does given my impassioned proselytization of digital history it s not surprising that i received an email from a colleague asking a reasonable yet hard to answer question what exactly does python do his name s not important but let s call him bob so if you ve bothered reading any of my recent posts and just wish i d start from the beginning or shut up already here s my take on python and computer programming geared towards computer knowledgeable people who haven t programmed before this is the perspective of someone who s been a digitally savvy humanities type for thirty years but has only recently dived into learning a computer programming language from scratch someone keep in mind who s never gotten the official version from a computer science course but who does teach a digital history course so it s therefore a focus on all the small and medium sized things you can have your computer do for individual historical research the digital historian s low hanging fruit what exactly does a computer program do python is a high level general purpose programming language which means it uses a syntax that is relatively readable unlike the machine code used by the matrix and it can do all sorts of things with just about any kind of data you can imagine but unlike the matrix you can t really bend or break the rules at least i can t not python code so asking what exactly a programming language like python does doesn t emphasize enough the fact that it does just about anything you could want assuming you have some digital information and assuming you want to do something with to that data that can be translated into a series of discrete steps an algorithm in other words there s a lot of gold in them thar hills but it s only worth prospecting if you have or can get a lot of digital data and need to repeat the same kinds of manipulations and analysis over and over for each character word paragraph document i want to do x y z if it says blah i want to i just introduced you to for and if loops in case you didn t notice as long as the above two assumptions are met nice to meet you boolean value true you re golden imagine that you were asked what exactly does microsoft excel do instrumentally you d probably reply that it allows you to type in numbers edit the numbers with features like copy and paste format the numbers in a variety of ways perform mathematical calculations on the numbers and print out or email the results or you could answer the question by giving specific examples of projects you could do excel allows me to balance my budget it lets me keep track of student grades or my fantasy league stats good answers all but just the tip of the iceberg you could create an entire excel spreadsheet that doesn t have a single number in it you could use excel to lay out a particularly complicated table that word s table feature chokes on or that word generally makes a pain in the arse to edit you could like i did twenty years ago use excel as a go between when transferring word notes into a note taking access database see that python post does have some utility after all you could even use excel to rename a whole folder full of files based off another list e g rename all those eebo tcp files you downloaded which have names like a10352 txt in a sense that literally has almost nothing to do with spreadsheets you delete the excel file when you re done because it was just a means to an end in other words what exactly excel does is limited most broadly by the features built into the application but more practically it depends on the vision and technical expertise of the person using it same with a computer programming language but the python canvas starts out with nothing at all on it not even a grid of empty cells intimidating but its tabula rasa lets python deal with all sorts of different types of information and allows you to manipulate them in an almost infinite number of ways because you can keep building layer upon layer of functions on top of each other drawing in data and inputs from all sorts of places and sending them wherever you want so if you can think of a specific series of commands you invoke using some packaged software like word or excel or your web browser you can probably recreate that workflow in python but it s not just about replication i see three main advantages to coding over a packaged piece of software coding allows you to totally control the inputs the manipulations and the outputs don t like the way a program formats the results change it wish the summary feature would also include your favorite statistic include it hate how the program always does this one annoying thing fix it performing the task will be automated with python so you could run it thousands of times in a few seconds or more depending on the complexity of the task without getting carpal tunnel syndrome some packaged programs allow you to install or use macros to record these repeated actions and programming is like that but so much more because you have so much more control and a much larger toolbox to draw upon the result is a quantitative increase in speed but that quantitative increase is really a qualitative advance you can do things that you d never do otherwise because the computer does most of it for you you don t need to purchase learn and maintain the dozen different programs that would be needed to to do most of the data analysis you can perform with python nor do you need to worry about your specialized programs disappearing into history as happens shockingly often unless your name is microsoft or apple or adobe nor do you need to worry about radical changes from version to version if you ve experienced several generations of microsoft office or blackboard or heaven help you mobile apps you know what i mean python will definitely require you to keep an eye on changing python library versions and possible incompatibilities that might result but at least with python you can create virtual environments so that you can run different versions of the same libraries on the same machine and there are even web environments that allow you to set all of that up for the user python in other words allows you to create workflows that automate a lot of the processing and analysis steps you d have to do manually possibly in many different programs input data manipulate it in any number of ways and then output it but it definitely comes with a learning curve i won t lie a learning curve that is currently a lot harder for humanists in my humble opinion because we are not the primary users and therefore we don t have many pre made history specific libraries with functions already designed as a result i ve spent most of my time learning the fundamentals the eye candy of maps and charts is much better served by dedicated libraries that require less programming knowledge and more domain expertise my experience over the past several months has reinforced three important programming principles that i m sure programming 101 courses emphasize think through the nature of your data at each point in your code think through each logical step in your algorithm pay constant attention to the numerous syntax rules ignoring any of the above will lead to runtime errors fortunately you can google those error messages and probably figure out the problem since it will likely be a violation of one of the above principles are you trying to use string methods on a list item are you expecting your iterator to be an iterable do you really want to put the print function inside that loop are you blindly copying an online example without considering how your case is different and as i keep telling my students attention to details matter whether it s a missing close quote or a mismatched variable name but the computer will usually tell you if you make a mistake you learn these things over time and build up working code that you can copy or use as functions and practice makes perfect what exactly does python do for scholars for scholars a programming language like python can help manipulate and analyze whatever text numbers image video and sound information we have in digital form fortunately it s not as minimalist as all that thanks to a few thousand free libraries or modules that you import into the basic python package the libraries do most of the hard work behind the scenes i e most of the coding has already been done by the libraries authors so you just plug and play with some standard commands your specific data the specific variables you create and the specific commands combined in the specific order you choose figure out how to get your information into the code i e the computer s memory in a specific format based on its structure is it a string a list a dictionary manipulate the resulting data maybe you convert the string to a list after replacing certain features and adding others pass it on to the next block of code that does something else now that it s a list you can loop through each item and count those that start with the letter q do more things to the list and the count maybe if the count exceeds a certain threshold you send that word to another list then pass any of those results on to the next block of code until you ...
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